In the absence of official announcements, the government of El Salvador seems to have delayed the launch date of the so-called “volcano bonds”. Previously, the Salvadoran Minister of Finance, Alejandro Zelaya, had assured that the project would start on March 20.
In his intervention on Friday in a local television program, The Salvadoran Minister of Finance announced again that the launch of the so-called “volcano bonds” should take place between March 15 and 20, the same dates declared in his previous television appearance in February. Although this time Zelaya mentioned the unstable political situation in the world as one of the factors that could influence the planned calendar.
The project of a coin-shaped “Bitcoin city” at the base of the Conchagua volcano was presented by the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, in November 2021. In Bukele’s visionthe construction of this new city with the cryptocurrency mining operations and the minimum taxes would be financed with the issuance of 1,000 million dollars in bonds. These bonds, which since then have become famous as “Bitcoin bonds” or “volcano bonds”, they must last 10 years and pay an annual interest of 6.5% to their holders.
In December 2021, Samson Mow, chief strategy officer at Blockstream, El-Salvador’s partner in launching the bonds, revealed that the platform had already received “soft commitments” worth $300 million, mostly from “Bitfinex whales.”. Responding to Cointelegraph’s request in February, Fernando Nikolic, director of marketing at Blockstream, assured that the company would make an announcement in the first quarter of 2022.
As the Financial Times reported, the legislation needed to launch the bond sale has yet to pass through the Salvadoran parliament.
Cointelegraph sent the press request to the presidential administration of El Salvador. As Nikolic reported to Cointelegraph, Blockstream is unaware of the new launch dates because it is not working directly with the country of El Salvador to offer EBB1.
“The EBB1 will simply be issued on the Liquid network, which is operated by members geographically distributed around the world. Blockstream only serves as a technology provider. So when they are ready they will be able to issue the bond on Liquid in the same way as anyone else.” .
Meanwhile, El Salvador’s neighboring nation of Honduras could follow suit and become the second nation in the world to officially accept Bitcoin (BTC) as a payment method. According to some sources, this is because the Honduran president, Xiomara Castro, affirms that El Salvador should not be the only country that “flees from the hegemony of the dollar”.
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